Hi Billy. TIM stands for Thermal Interface Material, also known as thermal paste, thermal compound, thermal grease, etc. As for the 990FXA-GD65, yeah, it looks like MSI spent more time hyping its Military Class marketing gimmick than actually making a military Class product. Well, here's hoping they release a BIOS fix for the issues we're having real soon...

@JBI - Well, I haven't checked to see whether MSI has a hardware monitoring tool that can check temps properly but in the BIOS, temps used to go up to 71C with the fan running at ~6,000RPM. Now, temps still reach the 60's but the fan seems a lot quieter now at 3,500 - 4,000RPM (not so sure about this because I've been busy the past couple of days). Setting the fan speed target to 60C helps a lot but even when I disable fan speed target, it's still a lot quieter than before. And yeah, I'm a little curious how better TIM could greatly improve an issue a bunch of seasoned technicians couldn't figure out for two days.

Last edited by ronch on Fri Dec 21, 2012 1:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The whole "Military Class" thing is even sillier these days, with the real military pushing for more use of commercial parts (and software) in order to control costs. As a guess, in MSI's case it means something like "we've started paying attention to component QA, instead of just using whatever capacitors/MOSFETs/inductors are cheapest this month". Which actually does count for something, but says absolutely nothing about the quality of the BIOS code.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

I used to buy a lot of MSI product. Lately I just tend to stick to Asus; they're not perfect either, but their ratio of hits to misses seems better (and as I've noted elsewhere, they've consistently supported ECC RAM on their desktop Socket AM2/2+/3/3+ motherboards which is a plus in my book).

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

@JBI - I've never really had problems with MSI over the years, but this board is making me think MSI isn't what it used to be. My experience with Asus is that they don't allow you to flash the BIOS to an earlier version, which is kinda arrogant on their part, and suggests that they think they can never break anything that worked in the previous BIOS versions. Same with ECS; I used to like them but the market seems to dictate their destiny as I seem to see less and less of their stuff being sold.

Then again, Vishera is still very new and MSI has their work cut out for them to perfect their BIOSes with it. My friend's Gigabyte board also seems to be having issues with his A10-5800K, so I think all the board makers have some work to do before their BIOSes will work properly with Piledriver-based chips. It's part of the learning process, I suppose.

MSI has had their ups and downs. They were one of the hardest-hit vendors in the bad capacitor plague, but aside from that made pretty solid product. My old K7 Pro (Slot A) put in many solid years of service as my home file server after I did a DIY recap job on it.

I've never noticed the Asus BIOS flash issue, but then I don't tend to re-flash back to older versions much. Maybe I'll try it on one of my Asus boards just to see what happens and report back.

I agree that choices are dwindling. With the exit of Abit and DFI (and other smaller vendors like FIC, Soyo, Tyan, etc.) from the enthusiast market the number of options has definitely been on a downward trend for the past decade or so.

Edit: I guess I should consider myself lucky that my Asus M5A97 R2 seems to have no issues with Piledriver CPUs then. Just one more data point nudging me to stick with Asus, I guess! (Only issue I've had with the M5A97 R2 was a really brain-dead interaction between the Asus UEFI BIOS and the software RAID setup in Ubuntu's "alternate" installer, which is a pretty obscure corner case, and as likely to be Ubuntu's fault as Asus'...)

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Well...can't get my memory stable at 1866 (is still at 1600) , but the good news at least is that my 8350 has made it easily to 4.5 GHz stable on that same stock cooler and thermal paste. Will try for more at some point. The positive benefit of troubleshooting the memory speed is that I've found solid voltage settings for my cpu and memory in the current config...and what this all means....I can play Planetside 2 with decent frames finally.

@JBI - Crap! I was so close to buying the Asus M5A97! I guess things would've been a lot smoother for me if I got it instead, but you see, the MSI 990FXA-GD65 was on 'fire sale' when I bought it. It's normally $170 in my country but I got it for $85 because the store where I bought it from wants to practically give their 990FX boards away and make way for new models. Throw in 'military class' components and how could you possibly resist such a deal? I don't think I made a bad choice but I hope MSI will hurry up and iron out its Vishera kinks. And yeah, I don't think it's MSI's fault if current thermal monitoring tools can't properly read Piledriver thermal diodes. The noisy fan issue is practically fixed but I'd like to see more polish from the BIOS.

@Billy - What brand of RAM are you using? I'm using DDR3-1866 from G.Skill. Works flawlessly, although by default the 990FXA-GD65 wants to run the sticks at DDR3-1600 spec rather than -1866. I also noticed that the SPD info indicates the max bandwidth to be DDR3-1600. I emailed G.Skill about it and got a prompt reply saying that it's only spec'd as DDR3-1600 in the SPD because -1866 isn't really an official JEDEC-defined spec and some boards will not boot if DDR3-1866 RAM is plugged. Not sure I believe it, but heck, it's labeled as DDR3-1866 and runs at 1866MHz just fine. I just have to manually set it in the BIOS. G.Skill gets my respect. You should put it on your white list.

@Billy - What brand of RAM are you using? I'm using DDR3-1866 from G.Skill. Works flawlessly, although by default the 990FXA-GD65 wants to run the sticks at DDR3-1600 spec rather than -1866. I also noticed that the SPD info indicates the max bandwidth to be DDR3-1600. I emailed G.Skill about it and got a prompt reply saying that it's only spec'd as DDR3-1600 in the SPD because -1866 isn't really an official JEDEC-defined spec and some boards will not boot if DDR3-1866 RAM is plugged. Not sure I believe it, but heck, it's labeled as DDR3-1866 and runs at 1866MHz just fine. I just have to manually set it in the BIOS. G.Skill gets my respect. You should put it on your white list.

I'm pretty sure DDR3-1866 is an official JEDEC standard now, though I suppose it is possible that it wasn't when those modules were originally introduced.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Not only should it be running at 1866 with ease, but I should be able to clock the hell out of it. I've found the quality of Mushkin RAM to be on a level of its' own. My board will boot into windows ok with it @1866, but will randomly crash within a few minutes. If a bios update doesn't come soon I may try and clock it by upping the FSB, although that will be a learning experience for me on the current platform.

The last time I used an MSI product was back in the early half of the 2000s. It is the last MSI product I purchased. Not due to capacitor plague problems (the board in question was covered in Rubycon caps), but because they had a constant string of weird BIOS related issues. None of them serious, but all of them irritating. The firmware of a motherboard is a huge deal and I'm just not comfortable that MSI puts the resources they should into that area of their products.

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend. Come inside! Come inside!"

@ RonchTried the new bios release? Any luck.? Just intalled it here but haven't started playing with voltages yet.

Ryu Connor wrote:

The last time I used an MSI product was back in the early half of the 2000s. It is the last MSI product I purchased. Not due to capacitor plague problems (the board in question was covered in Rubycon caps), but because they had a constant string of weird BIOS related issues. None of them serious, but all of them irritating. The firmware of a motherboard is a huge deal and I'm just not comfortable that MSI puts the resources they should into that area of their products.

Yeah, this board/bios has been such a pain I'm actually back to stock settings...like beating my head against the wall.

I never thought you'd still check this thread after many months. Well, here's hoping you'll see this reply..

Last April I got myself a nice, proper cooler and that brought temps down quite a bit and also brought noise down a LOT. The system would sound like a banshee during load when there's no A/C with the stock cooler, but now that doesn't happen and at most I could hear a faint whisper inside the case with the new cooler. It's a Deepcool Gammaxx 400, by the way. Doesn't look fancy, but it's tall and quiet. Nice bang for the buck, according to some reviews I've read on it.

I tried CoreTemp RC5 just now and it seems to me that CoreTemp still can't read my CPU's thermal sensors correctly. That, or my CPU's sensors are busted. I'm not entirely sold on the 'busted' theory though, because the BIOS reads the temps credibly enough and the stock CPU fan, as I've said, spins up like a banshee at load and when there's no A/C. No way for that to happen if the board doesn't know that the CPU's getting hot, right?

I've read somewhere that AMD introduced a new way to read the FX's thermal sensors. There's a formula to it and it's different from the way Phenom II CPUs' thermal diodes must be read. It's an interesting lead, except folks like JBI say they're not running into the issues we're having. I don't know.

There's also a new BIOS version on MSI's website, ver. 20.2. I think there's another version before that that's newer than 19.9, but MSI seems to have taken it down. I remember its only for Windows 8 support so I didn't bother getting it, and I was also kinda wary of Win8's crazy boot-up mechanism (haven't really looked into it since I'm keeping my distance from the OS and anything related to it... even a BIOS update for it). 20.2 seems to fix a PS2 or keyboard problem. Not sure if that's what we're looking for.

I'm downloading MSI's Control Center app right now, but MSI's servers are a little bit on the slow side so it's taking a while. I'll try and see if it actually reads the thermal diodes right. I'm really hoping the diodes aren't busted. I've been reading quite a lot of cases like ours (way too low temps). Btw, I've seen this sort of behavior on an Intel machine we have here somewhre. Temps seem too low.

Ok, guys, for those of you having trouble monitoring the temps of your FX CPU with an MSI board under Windows 7 using thermal monitoring apps such as CoreTemp, Speccy, HWMonitor, OCCT, and even AMD Overdrive (temps TOO LOW), you might wanna try MSI's own Control Center utility. I don't know why I never tried their app (maybe I am biased against software board makers write), but I'm sure as hell glad I did. I downloaded it just now and it seems to be reading the temps on my FX-8350 well enough. It's reading 36C to 37C right now and the room's about 24C, using my own skin to estimate the room's temp (yeah, i know, I'm probably off by a thousand degrees!). Looks about right to me, I guess. Plus, it doesn't jump around like a crazed banana. Maybe MSI has some sort of weird thing going on that throws off most thermal monitoring apps. I dunno. Even AMD didn't give me a good answer when I emailed them months ago. Man, someone's gotta fix their email tech support system too.

Maybe it's coincidence but I've had bad luck with MSI AMD boards but MSI boards for Intel CPU's, I've had good luck and is generally stable, in the past 5-6 years. Like others, I still prefer ASUS over MSI.